And so it begins...

Some might question the wisdom of starting a professional blog while in transition (read: not currently employed), but I say when else am I going to have the time to start this ball rolling, so wise or not, this is when I start.

I have been a full-time computer professional since my first post-college job at a local Computer Software Giant in 1996, but have gotten paid to work in the software/information technology industry on and off since my first post-high school summer job in the TSO Lab at the headquarters of a Savings And Loan Corporation in 1990. Since then I have worked for a Mortgage Brokerage, two different Computer Hardware/Software Manufacturers, a Closed Circuit Educational/Entertainment News Channel, an Online Learning Company, a Large Insurance Company, and a Mainframe/OnPremise/SAAS Applications Development/Solutions Company. All that is by way of saying, I have been around the block, at least a few of times, but I still feel that I have a lot to learn.

I have been practicing some form of Agile Development since 2004 when I was introduced to XP (eXtreme Programming), I have since worked on teams using AUP and Scrum. I became a Certified ScrumMaster and Certified Scrum Product Owner in July 2009, and finally signed the Agile Manifesto last week in March 2010. So I've been around that block as well, but not as many times, and look forward to experiencing and learning more.

Ok, now that I have established who I am, and what I've done, I may like many a blogger go dark and never be heard from again, but I think that will probably not be so. As I said earlier I am in transition, and the act of interviewing, preparing for interviews, recovering from interviews, etc. will probably supply the content of some of my early blog posts, past that, who knows. I read interesting ideas, and have some of my own, and now I have a place to share them, and that should ultimately be a good thing.

Right now, as I type this post I just finished downloading VPC 2007 SP1 and the Alpha3 candidate of Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) and am creating a new virtual machine so I can brush a little rust off of my Linux tech muscles to prepare for coding questions. I've done this before using Sun xVM VirtualBox (with Ubuntu 9.04 and Fedora Core 11), and used VMWare before, but this is my first attempt using the Microsoft product.

I'll keep you posted on my progress....